First Parish Sermon Archive

“WITH THANKS FOR WHAT HELPS

WHEN THE GOING GETS HARD”

 

The Sermon at the First Parish in Wayland, Massachusetts

On January 3, 2010

By the Rev. Ken Sawyer

 

[The sermon was preceded by the choir singing, “Hard Times Come Again No More.”]

 

Still, the hard times they do come around once more, and then again, and again, although sometimes only cause for sighing, while sometimes cause for a dirge.

 

And people get through. I have been amazed all my professional life with the resiliency of the human spirit, how people face crisis and loss you would think would be unbearable, and they bear it.

 

Believe me, I have been there, over and over, when the crisis and loss, the turmoil and anguish, have been nothing to speak of lightly. But awful as the situation has been, and will be again, sorry to say, people survive; and then they recover, almost always, although almost always too, not without some lasting if diminished effect.

 

How do we do that? People lose jobs, even whole careers; they are heavily invested in ways that witness their financial security vanish; the diagnosis is daunting, theirs or that of a parent or partner or sibling or dear friend or even a child.

 

How do we do that? And we do. I confess my own personal assignments of grief have been minor in the balance. But I have been with many of you as you have faced an awfulness of life when your tenacity, even buoyancy, has been awesome, even if while you went through it, you felt anything but overwhelmed.

 

Early on in the week Sandy Hoyt emailed me the link to a book review in Tuesday’s New York Times, which was amazingly fortuitous, because the author has the same point to make. “Resilience in the face of loss,” he writes, “is real, prevalent, and enduring.”

 

The author is George Bonanno, a professor at Columbia University Teachers College and a clinical psychologist. The book is The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After a Loss. It seems to be catching on quickly, because it was checked out of every library in the Minuteman system, and not only did no local bookstore have copies, neither does the publisher. But Suse Keyes arranged for me to borrow her neighbor’s Kindle and bang, there it was. I get by with a little help from my friends – which turns out to be a point made by Bonanno and just about everyone else.

 

One could say Bonanno’s main point really is that people experience loss and other traumas in a whole variety of ways. This insight grows out of the research that he and others are doing in the science of bereavement. There are people whose recovery from a loss or other trauma is only slow and gradual, and others who have chronic grief reactions, diagnosable as Prolonged Grief Disorder. But Bonanno believes we have “underestimated the human capacity to thrive after extremely adverse events.”

 

He writes, “The good news is that for most of us, grief is not overwhelming or unending. As frightening as the pain of grief can be, most of us are resilient. Some of us cope so effectively, in fact, we hardly seem to miss a beat in our day-to-day lives. We may be shocked, even wounded, by a loss, but we still manage to regain our equilibrium and move on. That there is anguish and sadness during bereavement cannot be denied. But there is much more. Above all, it is a human experience. It is something we are wired for, and it is certainly not meant to overwhelm us. Rather, our reactions to grief seem designed to help us accept and accommodate losses relatively quickly so that we can continue to live productive lives. Resilience doesn’t mean, of course, that everyone fully resolves a loss, or finds a state of ‘closure.’ Even the most resilient seem to hold onto at least a bit of wistful sadness. But we are able to keep on living our lives and loving those still present around us.”

 

He offers some observations about what things help people cope, and I have been collecting others. But first let me go back to his point that the research shows that bereavement is not one-dimensional, the same for all. Freud wrote about “the work of mourning” and “modern theories of bereavement have … retained the idea that grief is work – work that is time-consuming and must be done before full recovery can take place…. The work of mourning is now commonly viewed as requiring a series of tasks or stages,” as in the writing of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross.

 

But people experience loss and mourning each in their own ways. And there are positive natural forced at work, like sadness, that helps us reflect deeply on our loss and to come to accept it, to recalibrate our lives without the lost one, and – this is an interesting point – it elicits sympathy and caring. That response in others seems to be hard-wired in people, and good that it is, because that caring, that human interaction, that engagement with others, is important to receive.

 

I invited you in the newsletter to share your own experiences of what helps in hard times. I was not flooded with responses, but Dorothy Dunlay noted that after her husband died, what really helped – and she said I could quote her — was reaching out to friends and accepting their kindness, not being afraid of asking for help, and being able to give as well. She quoted Beverly Sills: You can’t always be happy but you can be cheerful.”

 

Bonanno points out that if you can’t be cheerful at least part of the time, sadness stops being the positive short-term emotion it is, and becomes not inviting but alienating, which is not what you want. He portrays an oscillation between sorrow and other, cheerier states of mind. Joy returns at times, and even laughter. In time the cycle widens and equilibrium happens. There will still be those times, especially at anniversaries and holidays, when the sorrow cycles back, but not as often and not to stay.

 

Bonanno says that humans have a surprising ability to bring about positive states of mind, and it helps in the grieving process. Optimism helps those who can muster it, and self-confidence, and some sense of control. People who cope well during bereavement tend to be like that, to have a “deep-rooted sense that they can and should be able to mourn,” so they “gather their strength, regroup, and work toward restoring the balance in their lives.” And they have their good memories, and maybe the comforting awareness that the deceased person would rather they be happy than sad.

 

And then there’s “coping ugly.” The Chicago White Sox in the mid-1970s managed to win more games than likely; it was referred to as “winning ugly,” doing whatever it takes. “When bad things happen,” notes Bonanno, “people often find the strength to do whatever is necessary to get back on track.” Like indulging a self-serving bias, distorting or exaggerating so we come off looking and consequently feeling better. “Yes, I did do everything I could have” is good protection against dangerous doubts, even if the facts are more murky. Finding a silver lining, counting our blessings, noting that it could have been worse – Bonanno says these are not acts of denial but of coping.

 

I came upon a quote by Anne Hathaway, the actress, who apparently had a god-awful divorce or break-up last year. “As horrible as what I went through was, it’s not the worst thing that could happen to a person. In the history of humanity, it doesn’t even come close” – a criterion that covers anything that is apt to happen to her or to any of us.

 

Hathaway also said this: “I started making fun of it around my friends and family and also to let everyone know it was okay to be struggling with it, as well. If I can find humor in it, that means I’m going to be okay. If something happens to me that I can’t laugh about, look out, there goes my soul.” Bananno writes, “What realty matters, in terms of our long-term health, is the ability to crack a grin…. It is [such] respite from the trench of sadness that makes grief bearable. It is the marvelous human capacity to squeeze in brief moments of happiness and joy that allows us to see that we may once again begin moving forward.”

 

For some, the laughter comes easily, for others not, and of course it all depends on the circumstances. The key point is, bereavement is different for everyone, even though there is conventional and professional wisdom that suggests otherwise. When people cite the book, besides Bananno’s emphasis on resilience, they note how controversial the book is for its attack on that wisdom, an attack he says arises directly from the results of research, his and that of others in the field.

 

It is commonly thought that people need to express their pain after a loss, that dealing with grief involves hard work over time and a set of necessary stages to go through, that it is wrong to skip steps or to bounce back too quickly, that positive emotions are a sign of denial, that hidden unresolved grief can linger and be experienced later as delayed grief, and that “the only way to recover from a loss is to sever the emotional bond with the deceased.” Bananno says none of those beliefs is supported by the research.

 

And the conventional wisdom can stand in the way of people welcoming their progress, the return of laughter, the mellowing of memory, their ability to get back to enjoying their work and their leisure, the easing of the pain and the mental disorder. People can worry that their ability to move on demonstrates a lack of love for the deceased, something wrong about that relationship or wrong about them.

 

Of course, not everyone is resilient, and not in every situation. Thank goodness there are trained professionals to work with people who need that help. It’s just that, from Bananno’s perspective, as a culture we have projected those struggles on everyone, whereas he can cite abundant evidence that people, if they survived, bounced back remarkably well after Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the SARS epidemic, and 9/11.

 

There are other things in the book I won’t get to, like his resolution of his troubled relationship with his late father; and descriptions of how most other cultures deal with grief through communal ritual, whereas we focus not on things we do but on how we feel; and reflections on maintaining emotional bonds with the dead.

 

But I close but repeating, as he does, his point about resilience. “…Humans are wired to survive. Not everyone manages well, but most of us do. And some of us, it seems, can deal with just about anything. We adapt, we change gears, we smile and laugh and do what we need to do, we nurture our memories, we tell ourselves it’s not as bad as we thought, and before you know it, what once seemed black and bottomless has given way; the dark recedes and the sun once again peeks out from behind the clouds.”

 

May it be so for you.